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IBM to acquire Confluent

confluent.io

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Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#211

Post by lII1lIlI11ll »

numbsafari wrote: post #207
jhallenworld wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>mind boggling Byzantine rules Hint: by all means possible, make sure you are not the owner of (or manager of the person who owns) any assets beyond your personal laptop. If, for example, you end up being the owner of all the development and test servers of the original company, then it will become your responsibility to ensure that each OS (of each LPAR of each VM) is security compliant, is running the end-point ass…

… isn’t this… what you should be doing already?

> … isn’t this… what you should be doing already?

I still "own" (i.e. I'm the sole user with a root access and can install OS of my choosing) an old machine from the days before everything moved to a cloud and guess no one from IT has got to decommission it yet. I'm have no idea where it is located (besides knowing which office it is assigned to), never saw it, no way in hell am going to attach any tags and waste my time to install enterprise spyware on it or manually encrypt it's data. Do engineers do that for development servers on your job? If yes, name and shame!

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#212

Post by denimnerd42 »

rdtsc wrote: post #174
sausagefeet wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HCP wasn't any prize when they got bought, though, right? HashiCorp Cloud was more like a fog in terms of growth. A bunch of products got lost a long the way (Boundary? Waypoint?) HCP lost 50% of its IPO value by the time it was bought. Yes, I know IPO's are high and always go down, but it went from around a $14bn valuation to being bought for something like $6.5bn.

I never quite figured out why IBM even bought them. Terraform? Wasn’t there an open source clone by that point?

terraform and vault are both sticky products

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#213

Post by ljm »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #30

IBM have an absolutely stellar record of blowing acquisitions. The highly motivated newly acquired team will be in honeymoon phase for 3 months, and then it slowly dawns on them that they’ve joined an unbelievably rigid organization where things like customer satisfaction and great products don’t matter at all. Then they’ll be in shock and disbelief at the mind boggling Byzantine rules and internal systems they have…

This feels like the kind of post you can only write with sombre experience.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#214

Post by acomjean »

newsoftheday wrote: post #208
CharlieDigital wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything I once had to use Lotus Notes after the company I was at was acquired by the now defunct Computer Sciences Corporation. I decided I would never, ever work for another company that used Lotus Notes.

A lot of people seem to voice a disdain for Notes but I actually liked it for some reason.

Notes was pretty decent as a groupware/ nosql platform. Lotus script wasn’t great. I might be biased because my first CS job was to write applications with it.

It felt like they basically tacked on the email functionality to to Notes to sell it, but it always seemed kinda ok to me.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#215

Post by ljm »

gedy wrote: post #60
cr125rider wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope Hashicorp survives. A few higher ups I’ve talked to there made it seem like IBM wants to learn from them, not force their old ways onto Hashicorp. We’ll see. That one is still pretty new.

Not to be cynical but that's said a lot in acquisitions by bigger companies to motivate some people to stay, but just doesn't seem to happen.

For every incredible journey there is an equal and opposite lesson to be learned

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#216

Post by CoastalCoder »

newsoftheday wrote: post #208
CharlieDigital wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything I once had to use Lotus Notes after the company I was at was acquired by the now defunct Computer Sciences Corporation. I decided I would never, ever work for another company that used Lotus Notes.

A lot of people seem to voice a disdain for Notes but I actually liked it for some reason.

That's because your comment is only 3 levels deep.

Let's revisit this when it's Reply to Reply to Reply to Reply :)

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#217

Post by brown9-2 »

kitd wrote: post #46
jhickok wrote: post #9

“With the acquisition of Confluent, IBM will provide the smart data platform for enterprise IT, purpose-built for AI.” https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-12-08-ibm-to-acquire-confluent... I don't understand how this acquisition is relevant for AI.

Event-driven AI decision making is the C-suite wet dream. A large % of major orgs run Kafka for their eventing systems.

not for much longer

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#218

Post by ericol »

paxys wrote: post #117
ericol wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house I do. I remember going to a chat once where they wanted to get people on-board in using it. It was 90 minutes of hot air. They "showed" how Watson worked and how to implement things, and I think every single person in the room knew they were full of it. Imagine we were all engineers and there were no questions at the end…

Watson was nothing like ChatGPT. The first iteration was a system specifically built to play Jeopardy. It did some neat stuff with NLP and information retrieval, but it was all still last generation AI/ML technology. It then evolved into a brand that IBM used to sell its consulting services. The product itself was a massive failure because it had no real applications and was too weak as a general purpose chat bot.

I had no idea about what Watson was initially meant to solve.

I do remember they tried to sell it - at least in the meeting I went - as a general purpose chatbot.

I did try briefly to understand how to use it, but the documentation was horrendous (As in, "totally devoid of any technical information")

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#219

Post by framebit »

jhallenworld wrote: post #199
AMerrit wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a small company acquired by IBM in 2011. We had a good 5-6 year run where our product sales went up (largely because so many IBM people were selling it) and we were largely left alone. Once things slowed down a bit the IBM rot set in quick though. These days I think all that's left is a skeleton crew maintaining the obligatory long term contracts around the main product, every other part of the original…

You can measure it by how many management steps you, as an employee of the recently acquired company are from the CEO in the hierarchy. As time goes on, this number tends to increase. It used to be easy to see this in Lotus Sametime or something that had some form of employee directory.

Fun fact: there's an IBM/Lotus Sametime theme song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daitUOzVpvc The lyrics rhyme "PC" with "easy."

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#220

Post by politelemon »

ahoka wrote: post #140
Romario77 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pull vs push. Plus if you start storing the last timestamp so you only select the delta and if you start sharding your db and dealing with complexities of having different time on different tables/replication issues it quickly becomes evident that Kafka is better in this regard. But yeah, for a lot of implementations you don't need streaming. But for pull based apps you design your architecture differently, some thin…

Funny you mention that, because Kafka consumers actually pull messages.

What is the reason for using Kafka then, sorry if I'm missing something fundamental.
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